Word: franzen
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...hours spent watching TV or picking up a book only in order to drop it on a cockroach are over. Oprah is reviving the club, but this time she will focus on the classics. This should help avoid any unpleasantness, such as the flap that arose with author Jonathan Franzen. After Oprah anointed his book The Corrections, Franzen expressed ambivalence about having his novel embraced by Oprah fans. By choosing works by Shakespeare, Faulkner, Hemingway and other dead people, she will probably circumvent such ingratitude...
Only one of the 13 pieces here addresses the Oprah incident, when Franzen voiced doubts about having The Corrections, his supremely successful third novel, selected for her book club. As most everyone knows, it was quickly unselected, and Franzen was cast in some places as the world's dumbest whiner. What was his problem? You get a glimpse of it in an essay describing the tortured afternoon last year when an Oprah film crew prodded him into a contrived visit to his childhood home. That ordeal by television caused him to break out in an itchy rash. But he suffers...
...Franzen has very little quarrel with Oprah. His real problem, and one that he lays out with care all through the book, is with a world in which the interior life becomes ever more threadbare as the means to sustain it--especially the essential consolations of serious reading--wither away. In tones that are sober but never lugubrious, Franzen weighs the pressures upon the self in a culture that manages the neat trick of discouraging real solitude and genuine community, substituting for both the paradox of media-overloaded isolation. "The first lesson reading teaches," he writes...
...always with another consciousness. What good fiction fosters is not self-absorbed isolation but isolation as the first step toward engaging the mind of the writer or his characters. So the keystone of this book is "Why Bother?", a revised and retitled version of a now famous essay that Franzen published six years ago in Harper's magazine. He tries to define a purpose for himself as a novelist in a society in which "the rising waters of electronic culture have made each reader and each writer an island." He finds in fiction the hope of signaling across the archipelago...
...Franzen's book were just an exercise in elegant melancholy, a requiem for reading, it would be handsome but unhelpful. It's not in his ambivalent nature to provide anything so clear-cut as answers (he's beautifully beset), but he frames the questions fully and with feeling. Do good books matter anymore? This one does. --By Richard Lacayo